Becoming a freelance / fractional CTO
You're already doing the job. You're just not billing for it.
2-day training for tech freelancers: support leaders on their technical strategy, and sell that role as a recurring offer.
The symptom
The contract says "development services"
You've been working with this client for eight months. Officially, you're the senior dev.
In reality: you're the one deciding what makes it into next quarter. You're the one running the technical interviews. You're the one who reined in the offshore vendor when quality dropped. You're the one who explained to the founder why the rewrite sold to him as four months would actually take twelve.
You're billing a day of development.
The founder can't quite name what you do. He just knows he calls you before every important decision. The day he has to cut the budget, he'll look at your line item as a dev line, and compare it to another dev's.
The gap between what you bring and what you sell is exactly what this training fixes.
The cost of inaction
What it's actually costing you
You carry the responsibility without the mandate.
You're asked to make calls, but you have no written scope, no formal legitimacy, and no access to the business information that would make your calls sound.
You're selling time where a role is expected.
A well-made architecture decision is worth several months of team time. Billed by the day, it's worth the price of a day.
Your influence stops when you leave the room.
You're on site three days a week, everything runs. You drop to one day, everything degrades. Nothing was set up to survive your absence.
You improvise the decisions that matter.
How many devs to hire and when, keep or drop a vendor, rewrite or consolidate, what to document. You decide on gut instinct, with no framework, and the doubt eventually shows.
The client doesn't renew.
Not out of dissatisfaction. Simply because they never managed to put into words what you brought them, so they don't know what they're losing.
What changes
What you gain
A defined role and a single point of contact.
You work with the leader, on the decisions they can't make alone. Your mandate is written, so is your scope, including what you won't do.
A recurring offer.
Two to four days a month, over twelve months, with predictable revenue and a client who keeps you because they see what you're for. It's a different business model from fixed-price missions or staff augmentation.
Frameworks for the five structuring decisions.
Technical roadmap, debt and architecture, hiring, vendors, governance. You stop replaying every trade-off from scratch.
A relationship with the leader that doesn't run on likability.
You know how to translate a technical issue into a business one, raise a disagreement without turning it into a conflict, and say no to a request without losing the mandate.
Value that holds up even at three days a month.
Because what you put in place keeps working the other twenty-seven days.
Profile
Who it's for
Experienced freelance developers, tech leads, architects and technical consultants who want to move from technical executor to partner of the leadership. Also: employed CTOs considering going independent, and freelance CTOs already in the role who want to structure and sell a recurring offer.
You need solid experience in development or architecture, and ideally to have already held a technical referent, lead, or team-responsible role, even informally.
This isn't for you if
you're looking for training in managing an employed team, a track to prepare for an in-house CTO role, or technical content on architecture. Here, we work on posture, decision frameworks, and the business model of the role.
The method
The main steps
Setting the role and the mandate
What a fractional CTO actually covers depending on the company's stage, and above all what they don't do. We work on the mandate letter: scope, decision authority, necessary access, explicit exclusions. This is the document that protects you the day you're asked to pick up urgent coding again.
The relationship with the leader
The heart of the job. How to translate a technical constraint into a business consequence, how to present a trade-off rather than a solution, how to contradict a founder on something they care about, and how to handle the moment your advice isn't followed. We also work on the relationship with a non-technical CEO, who doesn't share a CTO's decision-making reflexes.
The first thirty days: the initial audit
How to take stock of a situation quickly and well. What to look at, who to interview, which signals actually matter, and how to present an initial state of play that establishes your legitimacy instead of putting the team on the defensive.
Tech roadmap, debt and architecture
Building a technical trajectory readable by a leader and compatible with the product roadmap. How to make technical debt something that can be arbitrated, how to defend a structuring project that produces no visible feature, and how to make an architecture decision that commits the company for three years.
Building capacity: hiring and vendors
Sizing a team and sequencing hires, running a technical interview that actually predicts something, scoping and steering a vendor or agency, and knowing how to offboard a vendor without stalling the product.
Setting up governance
The rituals, forums and decision trails that keep the machine running when you're not there. This is what makes a three-day-a-month mandate defensible, and what lets you leave one day without everything collapsing behind you.
The thread running through both days is your offer. You leave with your own recurring mandate format: target, promise, engagement rhythm, deliverables, price, and renewal terms.
Deliverables
What you leave with
Pricing
Format and pricing
2 days
€1,800 excl. VAT
The full journey: mandate, relationship with the leader, initial audit, technical roadmap, hiring and vendors, governance, recurring offer.
3 days
€2,700 excl. VAT
An extra day of role-play on real cases brought by participants: a mandate-negotiation simulation, presenting a technical trade-off to a leader, handling objections, and pitching your recurring offer to the group.
Deliberately practical teaching: short methodology inputs, real cases, leader/CTO role-play, producing your own materials, and group feedback.
A single signed recurring mandate covers the training from the first month of the engagement.
Frequently asked questions
Questions we get asked
"I can build that for you."
"Here are the three decisions to make this quarter, what each one costs, and the one I recommend."
A leader can find a good developer in three weeks. Someone able to say that last line, much more rarely, and they keep them.